Jason Statham’s Mutiny is finally topping a chart. It’s the wrong one.
The film debuted at No. 1 on TorrentFreak’s weekly rankings of the most pirated movies for the week ending August 24, knocking Spider-Man: Brand New Day down to second place, with The Odyssey rounding out the top three.
There is no mystery about how it got there.
Amazon accidentally streamed the entire movie on Prime Video days before its theatrical release, and the copy circulating isn’t the usual shaky camcorder recording out of a theater.
A person close to the movie told Deadline “the genie is out of the bottle,” noting how rare it is for a pristine 4K copy with a finished sound mix to hit the internet before a film even opens.
Lionsgate has been firing off takedowns to get the movie pulled from pirate sites, while one buyer told the trade the film is plainly being streamed for free around the world, and the only real question is whether that cost each territory hundreds of dollars or millions.
Meanwhile, At The Box Office
Mutiny has now opened in most of the world, and the worldwide number is in: roughly $16 million, per Deadline, on a movie that runs $50 million-plus once Lionsgate’s acquisition and marketing spend are counted.
The $7.7 million domestic opening was already about half of what Statham’s recent theatrical outings pulled.
The UK managed only around $500,000, other territories came in soft, and buyers across multiple markets say the film is landing nowhere near where they expected.
Pre-release tracking reportedly looked similar to Statham’s past successes, and the movie is doing half or less of that business.
Note the irony: the two movies still burying Mutiny in theaters, Spider-Man: Brand New Day and The Odyssey, are the same two it just shoved down the piracy chart.
People are watching Statham’s movie. They’re just not paying for it.
The hope was that the international run would bail the movie out, the way it did when The Expendables 3 leaked three weeks early in 2014 and still cleared roughly $215 million worldwide. That rescue isn’t materializing.
Buyers Wait On Amazon’s Next Move
Per Deadline, last week’s fury has cooled into frustration, and buyers are hoping Amazon makes a good-faith offer to the distributors who paid millions to release the movie in their markets.
One overseas buyer described a week full of finger-pointing, calling Amazon’s mistake completely unacceptable while admitting nobody has taken the lead internationally and the damage is genuinely hard to pin down.
Statham himself is said to be among those disappointed by the leak.
Lionsgate is reportedly in talks with Amazon about next steps as it continues to assess the fallout, which lines up with Matt Belloni’s read from earlier in the week that Amazon ends up writing a check, or several. Amazon, Lionsgate, and the producers all declined comment.
Why Nobody Is Suing
Deadline reports there is little appetite for lawsuits, and the reason comes down to how the movie’s contracts are stacked.
The rights to Mutiny flow through a chain: overseas distributors bought the film from its producers, and it was the producers who made the deal that put the movie in Amazon’s hands.
A distributor in Germany or Japan has no contract with Amazon to sue over. To take the leak to court, a buyer would have to sue the producers for delivering a compromised movie, and the producers would then have to turn around and sue Amazon.
Nobody wants to start that fight. These are companies that buy and sell movies with each other year after year, and everyone involved seems to accept the upload was an honest, if disastrous, mistake.
What Comes Next
Deadline does float other factors in the soft numbers beyond piracy: the holdovers are eating everything in sight, and Statham’s January release Shelter also underperformed with a $5.5 million opening.
The next data point is Premium VOD, the early digital window where new releases rent at a premium price.
Those numbers land in the coming weeks and should show how much life the movie has left at home, though the same free 4K copy that shadowed the theatrical run is sitting out there competing with the paid rental, too.
Until then, buyers are waiting on Amazon. As one put it to Deadline, claiming the leak cost the movie nothing at the box office is fantasy, and the partners it burned are hoping the streamer makes things right.
